Zidoo X10 Android TV Box Review and Benchmarks

Zidoo X10 Android TV Box Review

The Zidoo X10 Android TV box is a monster size, very intimidating looking TV box, but is the Zidoo X10 really worth the price? In this review, I’ll be looking into what is identified as one of the biggest and most expensive Android TV box for 2017. I’ll provide insight into its hardware, along with benchmarks and my concluding remarks about this TV box, and is right for you.

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Appearance and Hardware

First off when the Zidoo X10 arrived I was amazed at the size of the box. It was the biggest Android TV box I’ve ever received and my expectations ran really high, I thought this has to be a box to compete with the Nvidia Shield! The box is big, heavy, and comes with two external antennas. When I saw the a cooling fan at the back, I got really excited now. However, my excitement was short lived once I dug into its hardware features.

The Zidoo X10, runs on a Realtek 1295DD quad core CPU running up to 1.4GHz. This CPU speed is low, lower than a cheap Amlogic S912 CPU box that runs at 1.5GHz. I was told not to be so quick the judge TV boxes performance by hardware specs, but by performance, so later you would see how the X10 did in the final results.

The Zidoo X10 display, is powered ARM Mali T820 tri core GPU (X3) running up to 750MHz. It comes with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. It has 802.11ac dual band 2.4GHz + 5.8GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. It comes with internal SATA hard drive capability, and cooling fan located at the back.

IO Ports and Design

The Zidoo X10 is made of metal which makes the box heavy but strong and attractive looking. It measures 7½ inches wide, and 2½ inches tall. With the box itself with a weight of 1.80kg, which equals to about 3.39 lbs. and the total package weight being 3kg or 6.61 lbs. To the back of the box, you get 2 HDMI ports, one is an input, and the other is the HDMI output. You have 1 RJ45 Ethernet port, 1 audio video port, you have one optical audio port, a micro SD card slot, a reset hole button, your DC power input, a cooling fan, making it the first Android TV box to implement this feature. And the last thing we have here, is 2 WiFi antenna connectors, and a power switch,

To the right side, you have one USB 3.0 port, and 2 USB 2.0 ports. On the left side, you have a high speed 3.5 inch SATA hard drive docking bay, with a max capacity of up to 10TB. To the front, you have what is called a bright vacuum fluorescent display, or VFD display for short. To the top, there are some features icons. And to the bottom, you have 4 rubber studs, and some ventilation holes.

Software and Features

The Zidoo X10 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, and Open WRT which I don’t really know how to use so I left it alone. The user interface is Zidoo trademark software called ZIUI. Now the ZIUI is one of the best user interfaces I used, it has a navigation bar at the bottom, and the settings area is unique and filled with extra features to customize the way you interface with the box. The launcher comes with a very useful clean up tool for freeing up system resources.

The HDMI recording software is really simple to use, and the PIP or picture in picture display is a nice addition. The ability to record on a 3.5 inches SATA hard drive up to 10TB is crazy cool. The box is not rooted and certain apps cannot be installed from the Google Play Store because of this.

It comes with a custom version of Kodi 16 called ZDMC but you can uninstall it and install Kodi 17.3 or later from the Play store. In my codecs information test it revealed that the Zidoo X10 comes with codecs like H.264, HEVC, and VP9 decoding. I could not identify with a H.265 decoder from the list.

The Zidoo X10 hardware specs are the same as the Zidoo X9S so there was no performance improvement from the last model. The low CPU speed had negative impact on the box’s performance, the box is not rooted. Certain 4K videos had some difficulty playing, and 3D gaming is not the best.

It does however do a great job recording video from other HDMI devices, and the cooling fan keeps the box cooler then all the other TV boxes I’ve reviewed. Kodi and other Streaming APKs works good no issues there.

So is this a good TV box to buy? For the recording purposes Yes, for streaming movies and TV shows Yes, for 4K playback not so much, for gaming, low ends games only. Price of this TV box is way too high.